Generative innovation
Generativity
Generativity refers to the basic idea that the observed complexity of a phenomenon1 can be traced back to some basic elements and their mechanisms for interaction (Phelan 2001).
Generative technology is defined as “a technology’s overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences” (Zittrain 2006).
Generativity is an emergent socio-technical phenomenon (Bygstad 2017): the capacity to innovate is determined by the ongoing discourse between the actors on their interpretation and use of artifacts (i.e., generative relationships).
- It is not an attribute of an object (such as technology), but rather the potential outcome of the interaction of different entities.
- The outcome is dependent on, but not reducible to the entities (e.g., people and technologies) and their characteristics (e.g., knowledge and skills, flexibility)
Generative mechanisms
The evolution of digital infrastructures can be described as the interplay between three self-reinforcing generative mechanisms (Henfridsson and Bygstad 2013):
- Innovation
- The creative combination of social and technical elements in order to create new services.
- Adoption
- The recruitment of users through easy-to-use solutions, which allows more investments.
- Scaling
- The expansion of the network to include more partners to provide more services.
A successful digital infrastructure is self-reinforcing, that is, it recursively feeds on itself.
Two knowledge regimes
| Heavyweight IT | Lightweight IT | |
|---|---|---|
| A knowledge regime, driven by IT professionals, enabled by systematic specification and proven digital technology and realized through software engineering. | A knowledge regime, driven by competent users’ need for solutions, enabled by the consumerisation of digital technology and realized through innovation processes. | |
| Profile | Back-end: Supporting documentation of work | Front-end: Supporting work processes |
| Owner | IT department | Users and vendors |
| Systems | Transaction systems | Process support, apps, BI |
| Technology | PCs, servers, databases, integration technology | Tablets, electronic whiteboards, mobile phones |
| Architecture | Fully integrated solutions, centralized or distributed | Non-invasive solutions, frequently meshworks (heterogeneous networks) |
| Culture | Systematics, quality, security | Innovation, experimentation |
| Problems | Increasing complexity, rising costs | Isolated gadgets, security |
| Discourse | Software engineering | Business and practice innovation |
Observations
Both are generative: heavyweight IT constitutes a powerful resource for developing new services; lightweight IT allows the non-IT specialist to deploy, use and benefit from IT to support their work processes.
| Heavyweight IT | Lightweight IT | |
|---|---|---|
| Innovation | Emerge from the interactions between different IT specialists in co-operation with business managers. | Emerge from the interactions of powerful users with IT product specialists. |
| Adoption | Tend to follow a waterfall model with implementation, training, and support from IT staff. Use is often mandatory. | Adoption tends to be voluntary and takes place in a more improvised process. |
| Scaling | May scale well or poorly, depending on its architecture and the skills of the IT staff. | Does not scale easily into other sites or domains, e.g. due to dependency on highly dedicated persons. |
Generative relationship
While heavyweight and lightweight IT has their internal generative capacities, the interaction between heavyweight IT and lightweight IT represents generates generative potential (Bygstad 2017).
However, the knowledge regimes tend to be more incompatible than often assumed, because of their nested structures of technology and work practices.
Thus, generativity does not mean tight integration, rather heavyweight IT and lightweight IT should be loosely coupled (i.e., technically and organizationally)
- Lightweight IT should support work processes successfully before it is integrated.
- Innovation is best served by different organisations developing heavyweight and lightweight IT.
Conclusion
Heavyweight IT is currently overloaded in most organisations, with rising cost, long backlogs and increasing complexity.
Adding lightweight IT into this situation will hardly make things easier. Rather, there is a need for a sensible division of labour between heavyweight and lightweight IT (Bygstad 2017).
- Heavyweight IT should concentrate on the stable elements of digital infrastructures
- Lightweight IT should provide the unstable and short-lived elements of the infrastructures
For this division of labor to work, it is essential that the two knowledge regimes be loosely coupled.
Q&A
Literature
Footnotes
E.g., Phenomona explained by generativity are for instance biological diversity, social systems and language↩︎